EXPERIENCE

Encourage them to sign up

ENTICE

Interact with them, don’t sell!

ENGAGE

When we first came across this model a few years ago, it put so much of what we were doing into perspective: hopefully it will do the same for you!

The idea behind the ‘experience, entice, engage’ model is that people need to ‘experience’ a brand and then be enticed by it in some way before they will even consider engaging with that brand, never mind buying it!

I think these days, we are a very ‘immediate’ and responsive society but even still, it takes us time to buy something. Often, by the time we come to buy something we have seen it on a social media challenge, we have walked past it in the shop, we have talked about it with friends etc. This is same from holidays and cars to clothes and food.

What I’m saying is that people rarely buy something outright before testing it, seeing their friends with it or having come across it before in some other way. This is even the same for services such as using an accountant, buying broadband and picking a primary school.

The experience, entice engage model is built on the premise that people buy from brands they know and trust. One of the best ways for a brand to reach this status is by offering an experience, usually free, that allows the customers to get a feel for what they do. It’s about giving them a taster they love and ultimately want more of!

For example,a brand might do tasting sessions (new food or wine), they might give away free samples (make up), they might do open days (schools and services), they might offer a free version (Linked In and Candy Krush), they might give you a test drive (cars), they might have a sample you can test (perfume), they might offer a ‘free go’ (gambling sites and bingo).

Their whole aim is to give you an experience that you enjoy and want more of. Even at this stage you might not be tempted enough to buy so you might well ‘Like’ them on Facebook, ‘Follow’ them on Twitter, sign up to a mailing list etc. At this stage, you have been enticed into their brand and it is at this point that the brand can start to engage with you.

You can see already that this is a very straight forward notion but it can be difficult to implement. Why? For starters, it takes commitment to a longer game: no-one will see your Tweet on Monday, sign up on Tuesday and then buy on Wednesday. With this approach you have to do a lot of work up front to catch someone’s interest and then maintain it! The great thing about this is it gets you thinking like a customer, not a sales person. Instead of asking ‘what can I sell’, you will find yourself asking ‘what can I share to get a like?’. Once you’ve mastered this, you will have a much better understanding of your target audience and you’ll have many more engaged followers.